When purchasing a home, a buyer needs to consider property taxes as an ongoing cost of living. Since not all property taxes are created equal, it’s important to know what your tax dollars are paying for.

A sixth annual study from SmartAsset finds the places in the U.S. where residents are receiving the most value for their property taxes.

SmartAssest ranked Stanislaus County among the top 10 counties in California where property tax dollars are going the farthest. To find where people were getting the most value, the study analyzed the following metrics, including:

• Quality of local schools;

• The rate of growth in home value;

• Effective property tax rates.

Stanislaus County ranked 10th among California’s 58 counties under SmartAsset’s rating system.

The rating does not tell the whole picture. While Stanislaus County attained a 3.0 school rating — which was far from the state rating of 5.50, the county made the list mostly because of its exceptional home value growth of 57.55 percent. Statewide the home value growth was rated at 29.89 percent.

The study of SmartAsset, which is a financial technology company providing the best personal finance advice on the web, aims to find the places in the United States where people are getting the most value for their property tax dollars. To do this, the compant analyzed property taxes paid, school rankings and the change in property values over a five-year period.

The methodology starts with using the number of households, median home value and average property tax rate to calculate a per capita property tax collected for each county.

As a way to measure the quality of schools, an analysis was done of the math and reading/language arts proficiencies for every school district in the country. The company created an average score for each district by looking at the scores for every school in that district, weighting it to account for the number of students in each school. Within each state, SmartAsset assigned every county a score between 1 and 10 (with 10 being the best) based on the average scores of the districts in each county. They then calculated the change in property tax value in each county over a five-year period. Places where property values rose by the greatest amount indicated where consumers were motivated to buy homes, and a positive return on investment for homeowners in the community.

Finally, they calculated a property tax index, based on the previously mentioned criteria. Counties with the highest scores were those where property tax dollars are going the furthest.

The worst ratings were given to Modoc, Mono, Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte, Siskiyou and Lake counties in California.

For more information on the report visit https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-property-tax-calculator#california